John Carlton Platt (born 1963) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

. He is currently a Fellow at

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, where he leads the Applied Science branch of Google Research. Formerly he was a deputy managing director at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

Redmond Labs. Platt worked for Microsoft from 1997 to 2015. Before that, he served as director of research at

Synaptics Synaptics, Inc. is an American neural network technologies and computer-to-human interface devices development company based in San Jose, California. It develops touchpads and fingerprint biometrics technology for computer laptops; touch, dis ...

Life and work

Platt was born in

Elgin, Illinois Elgin ( ) is a city in Cook County, Illinois, Cook and Kane County, Illinois, Kane counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. It is located northwest of Chicago along the Fox River (Illinois River tributary), Fox River. As of the 2020 United Stat ...

, and matriculated at

California State University, Long Beach California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), also known in athletics as Long Beach State University (LBSU), is a public teaching-focused institution in Long Beach, California, United States. The 322-acre campus is the second largest in the ...

, at the age of 14. After graduating from CSULB at the age of 18, he enrolled in a computer science PhD program at

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

. While a student at Caltech under astronomer Gene Shoemaker, he discovered two asteroids, 3259 Brownlee and 3237 Victorplatt at

Palomar Observatory The Palomar Observatory is an astronomical research observatory in the Palomar Mountains of San Diego County, California, United States. It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Research time at the observat ...

on 25 September 1984. The latter he named after his father Victor Platt, while the former was named by Gene Shoemaker. Shoemaker allowed Platt to name one of his discoveries, 3927 Feliciaplatt, which he named after his mother. In 1998, Platt invented sequential minimal optimization, a widely used algorithm for speeding up the training of

support vector machine In machine learning, support vector machines (SVMs, also support vector networks) are supervised max-margin models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laborato ...

s, which fixed the issue that

quadratic programming Quadratic programming (QP) is the process of solving certain mathematical optimization problems involving quadratic functions. Specifically, one seeks to optimize (minimize or maximize) a multivariate quadratic function subject to linear constr ...

brought to early machine learning techniques. In 1999, Platt continued his work into support vector machines, creating

Platt scaling In machine learning, Platt scaling or Platt calibration is a way of transforming the outputs of a statistical classification, classification model into a probabilistic classification, probability distribution over classes. The method was invented ...

, a method to turn SVMs (and other classifiers) into probability models. In August 2005,

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

had its application for a

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

on the interface of the popular

iPod The iPod is a series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 2001 to 2022. The iPod Classic#1st generation, first version was released on November 10, 2001, about mon ...

music player rejected by the

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an List of federal agencies in the United States, agency in the United States Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark ...

. The reason appears to be that Platt had submitted a patent application for a similar interface design five months prior to Apple's claim. Platt shared a 2005 Scientific and Technical Achievement Oscar from the

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., with the stated goal of adva ...

with

Demetri Terzopoulos Demetri Terzopoulos is a Greek-Canadian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is currently a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at ...

for their pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures.https://web.archive.org/web/20060413204557/http://www.oscars.org/78academyawards/scitech/winners.html (Backup at archive.org of http://www.oscars.org/78academyawards/scitech/winners.html Retrieved 2009-01-08.

References

External links

Asteroids discovered by John Platt

Machine Learning for Dummies
{{DEFAULTSORT:Platt, John 1963 births California Institute of Technology alumni California State University, Long Beach alumni Discoverers of minor planets Living people Microsoft employees People from Elgin, Illinois Google employees